January 16, 2022
A grey Sunday with the possibility of snow. They’re calling it a “Saskatchewan screamer,” this weather system moving northeast across the Tennessee Valley.
In the meantime, I’m trying to sort myself out. Will I ever untangle and publish the stories scattered across my notebooks? What am I doing with my time on planet earth? What do I stand for? But I’m not going to figure myself out today. It’s a lifelong process, I know, and I can’t imagine many of us walk around this world feeling certain about ourselves and the choices we’ve made—at least not without being an absolute jackass.
Looks like C. and I are going to London next month for a residency, omicron be damned. Now we’re neck-deep in the paranoia of nation-states and institutional logistics. Yesterday we got fingerprinted for an FBI background check, and I was surprised by my anxiety as we awaited the results. Maybe they’ve figured me out; I certainly can’t do it.
I felt myself bracing for surveillance footage of me doing something awful, maybe a print-out of my search history or photographs of my strangest dreams. But I’m clean. A search of the fingerprints provided by this individual has revealed no prior arrest date, said the report. This does not preclude further criminal history at the state or local level. I admire how they’ve hedged their bets in case I’m causing local problems.
So these are days of waiting. I’m waiting for the snow to arrive on this Sunday afternoon in the long middle stretch of January: teetering the cusp of things. The new year is no longer shiny, yet it has not fully started, its rhythms only faintly heard. There’s a thrum in the atmosphere just before the weather changes, maybe something to do with barometric pressure that I’ve never understood. The forecast has been downgraded from six inches of snow to only two, and there should be a word for this: the specific flavor of disappointment when the weather fails to perform as advertised.
I went for a short and ugly run to get out of my Sunday funk, and I stopped to admire a streak of white against the grey clouds: the contrails of an airplane—jet screams, I called them when I was small—and it neatly divided the sky in two. For a moment, I wanted to assign it cosmic significance.
